"There are some artists, and Tom Hanks is one, who go beyond mere popularity and instead come to embody some part of our shared American story....
"Is it telling, then, that in this time of declining trust in our institutions and one another, Tom Hanks is now playing a bad guy? One with a hand in the downfall of another American icon and myth maker? But in true Hanksian fashion he finds something unexpectedly hopeful even in this character. “I’m not interested in malevolence; I’m interested in motivation,” Hanks says about his role as the shadowy talent manager,
Col. Tom Parker, in the director Baz Luhrmann’s biopic “Elvis,” which premieres June 24. “All you can say is that he’s wrong,” he adds, “not evil.” There’s a useful lesson there. With Hanks, there often is."
Tom Hanks, as Col. Tom Parker, with Austin Butler as the title character in “Elvis.” Warner Bros. Pictures
SIDE NOTE: I never understood why Elvis never performed outside of the US & Canada. I read that Col Parker was afraid to leave the US, because
he was wanted for murder and feared extradition.
"Far from being born in West Virginia, Tom Parker was in fact a native of the city of Breda, in the southern part of the Netherlands. He had been born there in June 1909, the seventh child of a delivery driver and his wife. His real name was Andreas van Kuijk–”Dries” (pronounced “Drees”) to his family–and as far as anyone could tell, he changed it to Tom Parker because that was the name of the officer who interviewed him when he signed up for the Army."
"Huntington, West Virginia, meanwhile, was a stop along the route of the carnivals that the Dutch teenager worked when he first came to the States. Parker, or Van Kuijk, had other secrets too. Not the least of them was that he was an illegal immigrant, reaching the United States most probably through Canada. Nor had he ever been naturalized as an American."
